Tuesday Aug 05, 2014

This blog is written by one of our former curriculum developers, Fraser Guthrie, and a current curriculum developer, Brian Hudner. Fraser's main area of expertise is the Network Charging and Control (NCC) product, an Intelligent Network (IN) platform predominantly used in pre-paid charging systems. Fraser recently moved to another Oracle Communications team and is now in the role of Enablement Product Manager. Fraser came to Oracle during the 2009 EServe Global acquisition and was in our consulting organization prior to joining the Information Development team. Brian, a rare non-acquisition employee, joined Oracle initially to write about the Oracle Communications Network Intelligence product, has written and developed curriculum for a variety of our products and most recently worked with Fraser on the NCC courseware you're about to hear about. Between them, Fraser and Brian have over 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry in a variety of roles, including software test, product management, consultancy, training, technical writing, and curriculum development. In the last year or so, Brian and Fraser have co-authored three NCC courses, the two covered in this blog, and the recorded Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control Overview course that was released in February 2013. I hope you enjoy their blog, but I also hope you'll consider taking the training they've developed - they can vouch for NCC!

Cheryl Lander, Oracle Communications InfoDev Senior Director

We're pleased to announce the release through Oracle University of two new NCC training courses:

NCC System Administration and Troubleshooting

NCC Voucher Management

You can find out more information about what NCC does in one of our previous blogs. You can also learn about NCC by taking a couple of hours from your day to listen to the recorded NCC Overview course that Fraser and Brian created for Oracle employees and partners.

Keeping their telecommunications network up and running 24/7 is vital for today's communication service providers. Any loss of service can have a detrimental effect on the subscriber experience and can often lead to subscriber churn. To that end, proactively monitoring, administering, and troubleshooting your system is vital in order to minimize system downtime.

Plus many more useful tips about administering and troubleshooting your system.

This three-day course course is primarily aimed at System Administrators whose main role is
to monitor the NCC system, looking out for any issues that may impact system
operation and troubleshooting these issues.

The
course is a mixture of slides and hands-on exercises where you get the chance
to play the role of a System Administrator, using your very own NCC platform.

Network Charging and Control (NCC) Voucher Management

So,
what is voucher management, and how does NCC facilitate it?

A
telecom operator uses the NCC voucher management application to handle all
aspects of pre-paid telecom recharge vouchers. A voucher generally has a unique
serial number and may have a PIN code by which it is identified. Subscribers
can use vouchers to recharge their account balances by various methods
including contacting a call center and providing the Customer Service Representative
(CSR) with the voucher number, or by using a self-service process such as an
interactive voice response (IVR) system.

NCC
enables operators to manage all aspects of pre-paid recharge vouchers from
voucher creation, to redemption, to deletion. NCC voucher management provides
the ability to offer innovative subscriber services; for example, by allowing
subscribers to purchase innovative services using vouchers.

Using
the NCC voucher management functionality you can create batches of up to 10,000
vouchers at a time. Voucher types can support multiple balances of currency and
non-currency amounts, for example, or vouchers offering voice tailored bundles,
or bundles with an emphasis on data usage.

This
two-day course is a mixture of slides and hands-on exercises. You get the
chance to create vouchers and configure different voucher redemption methods in
the system, using your very own NCC platform. The course is suitable for System
Administrators and also service implementation engineers whose responsibilities
would include configuring services on the NCC system. The Voucher Management UI
is also covered in this course, so end users such as CSRs would also benefit
from certain aspects of the course.

Either
course can be taken remotely through web conference or in a live training class
environment. Pre-requisites for both courses include having a practical
knowledge of the UNIX operating system (preferably Solaris) and some Oracle
Database knowledge (DBA-level experience is not required). Ideally, you should
also have an understanding of Intelligent Networks and pre-paid charging
systems, and a familiarity with telecoms standards and protocols, such as SS7,
CAMEL, Diameter, GPRS, and so on.

We Value Your Feedback

If you would like to suggest improvements or report issues on any of the product documentation, curriculum, or training produced by the Oracle Communications Information Development team, you can use these channels:

Friday Feb 15, 2013

I’d like to introduce Jodie Wilford, Oracle Communications OSS InfoDev Director. She’s responsible for managing all of the documentation and curriculum for the Oracle Communications Operational Support Systems (OSS) products.As part of the MetaSolv Software, Inc. acquisition, she joined Oracle in February 2007.She has extensive experience in documentation, curriculum development, and training delivery.

Jodie’s team did a lot of great work in this release that she outlines in this post.Thank you Jodie and OSS team for all your great work.

Cheers,Cheryl Lander, Oracle Communications InfoDev Senior Director

Thank you, Cheryl.I would like to tell you about the latest release of OSS suite of applications that Oracle’s Communications released in January 2013.This is the second release in nine months which is a consistent, coordinated release of a suite of integrated OSS applications including the following products:

Oracle Communications ASAP

Oracle Communications Design Studio

Oracle Communications IP Service Activator (IPSA)

Oracle Communications Network Integrity

Oracle Communications Network Intelligence

Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM)

Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management (UIM)

First, and what we believe you’ll be excited to hear about, is searchable documentation for Network Integrity, Network Intelligence, OSM, and UIM that are now available on Oracle Technology Network.

About

This is a blog from the Oracle Communications Information Development team, led by Cheryl Lander, Sr. Director. She and members of her team from various functions (writers, curriculum developers, and architects) and product lines will share their approach to documentation and curriculum, all with the goal of getting feedback to improve their deliverables. We'd like to thank Joe Sciallo, UCS Tech Writer (former Sun) for pushing us into the social media world. The primary team driving this blog is called "Joe and the Blogettes"; other members include Brenda Roldan (BSS Tech Writer), Jodie Wilford (OSS InfoDev Director), Leif Lourie (SDP Curriculum Developer), and Scott T. Miller (Documentation Architect).